Welcome to the dumbest debate in sports.
“Load management” is what teams do so they can assure they get the most from their players in the most high-leverage situations. That doesn’t necessarily just mean the playoffs, that also means maximizing a player’s regular-season impact too. Forward-thinking teams have implemented this strategy over the years, grudgingly, because the evidence from medical and training staffs became overwhelming that it was a better way to manage a basketball team.
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Lots of TV shock jocks are rolling their eyes over this, but what they are really saying is that they think they know more about how to maximize player games than the team’s own professionals. Admittedly, one of the fun parts of sports fandom is occasionally thinking we know more than the manager or GM or whoever, but this gets into an area where very few people have any expertise at all. I guarantee the next person you hear pontificating on this issue knows little to nothing about cartilage.
While we’re here: The fact that players didn’t do this in the 1980s and some of them survived is irrelevant. We didn’t require kids to wear safety belts in the 1980s either, and I still survived. You would not use this as evidence to leave your own children unbuckled.
Again: The goal here is to maximize the number of high-quality games the player can play, and in particular the number of high-quality important games.
The issue that the “back in the good old days” crowd is missing is just how much more taxing the modern game is on players’ bodies.
That happens for two reasons: First, they’re in worse shape when they get to the NBA, and second, the NBA is a fundamentally different game than it was 20 years ago.
I haven’t heard either of these points discussed much in the load management debate, so let’s get right to it.
First, the players’ bodies. This the more minor of the two points, but it does matter. Most American-born NBA players took part in a ton of AAU tournaments, starting at a very early age, often with multiple games in a single day. Worse, most of them specialized at a (too) young age in one sport. Even in the seven years I was with the Grizzlies, we saw a marked increase in medical cases at the draft combine – players in their late teens and early 20s who had severe repetitive-use pathologies before they even arrived in the NBA. And those are just the ones who survived to that point.
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As a result, even by their mid-20s, virtually all of these guys are dealing with something. The schedule affords few opportunities to truly recover, so at times teams need to invent them.
Second, watch a clip from the 1980s and then watch some of the action today. People write about the NBA being more physical back then, but they’re missing the point – physicality isn’t what is creating the injury risk. The vast majority of basketball health management is knees, ankles, tendons and feet – shoves to the upper body or the occasional punch to the face aren’t impacting these body parts.
What those body parts respond negatively to, however, are accelerations and decelerations – the constant start-up and slow-down that is required to defend multiple dribble handoffs on a single possession…and required of all five players, even the ones on the weak side. That stands in sharp contrast to the iso and post-heavy days of yore, when much less was asked of weak-side defenders in particular and they could essentially chill for a while if their man wasn’t trying to score.
That Michael Jordan used to play 3,000 minutes a year is irrelevant, because a game minute in 1989 is not equal to a game minute in 2019. The pace-and-space era produces a lot more accelerations and decelerations for the 10 players on the court. And thus, relative to a minute of NBA basketball in 1989, a minute of 2019 basketball creates a lot more strain on the body parts most likely to break down over the course of a basketball season.
So, back to Kawhi Leonard.
He has a condition called tendinopathy in his knee, which is basically damage to a tendon that won’t get better. The league considers him an “injured player” in this case and, because of this, the rules on DNP-rest are more lax than they would be for others. We had this situation in Memphis with Chandler Parsons, whom we sat out of every single back to back over the entire 2017-18 season. The league didn’t penalize us for resting him in a national TV game (#wellactually they solved that problem when they made the schedule), or for resting him in a road game, because we had more latitude to determine the best course of action.
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Finally, for the “what about fans who bought tickets” crowd:
In 2016, we had a situation in Memphis where we had to rest both Mike Conley and Marc Gasol on the fourth game of the regular season. There was no debate internally about this. The schedule gave us a 4-in-5 the first week of the season, which is absurd (the league has since done away with 4-in-5s entirely), and it was worse in this case because both players were still recuperating from season-ending injuries the previous year. Our medical and training staff assured us that we greatly jeopardized the remaining 76 games by playing them four times in five days so early. (Side note: Playing a full game and then taking a full game off is also deemed by virtually every professional involved as a better alternative than half-assing it by playing 20 minutes each in both).
I’m sure there were people in Minnesota who bought a ticket thinking they’d see Mike and Marc play and they were probably upset. (Not that upset, since they got to see the T’wolves beat our asses by 36, but still). But there were also fans who bought tickets for our final 76 games, and they thought they were seeing Mike and Marc, too. We gave them a much better chance of that happening; indeed, both players finished the season healthy and played 69 and 74 games, respectively, that season – including a few strategic rests in between.
Some other notes from this week…
Cam Reddish in the spin cycle
Atlanta rookie wing Cam Reddish became an insta-meme with this nationally televised pirouette in the Miami game, but that wasn’t his only recent attempt at a right to left spin that ended in disaster.
Reddish had an equally spectacular episode in Tuesday’s win over San Antonio that sadly wasn’t captured on video, spinning himself directly over the feet of teammate Damian Jones and onto his back. The next night against Chicago he was able to complete the same move upright, but sans basketball – which quickly ended up in Kris Dunn’s hands at the other end of the court.
Reddish has operated as a point forward for the Hawks, especially when Trae Young is out of the game, but early results have been shaky at best – 15 turnovers, just 14 baskets. One easy way to reduce that first number would be to remove the spin cycle from his arsenal for a while.
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Searching for 4s in the 503
Zach Collins’ shoulder surgery will knock him out for most of the season, and that hits Portland right where it hurts the most. Power forward shaped up as the weakest link on this team coming in – the only true 4 on the team, Anthony Tolliver, spent last season collecting DNPs for the lottery-bound T’wolves.
Many in the league see Portland as one of the prime trade candidates as we get closer to the trade deadline, given the Blazers’ combination of expiring contracts, young players, draft assets, and need at the two forward spots.
In the meantime, it may inadvertently push the Blazers to try something that might prove beneficial. Portland entered this season scheming to play a “big” frontcourt of Collins and Hassan Whiteside, with Jusuf Nurkic joining the fold once he recovers from last season’s gruesome leg injury. (Likely around the trade deadline, conveniently).
With that option gone, look for Portland to go the other way and play small and fast for long stretches — using pseudo-4s like Mario Hezonja and even Kent Bazemore. They may get their butts kicked on the glass and it’s not clear how they’ll stop anybody – the Blazers are 21st in Defensive Efficiency right now, even with opponents bonking an unsustainable number of 3s, but one wonders if Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum can offset that with offensive fireworks in a faster, more open environment.
Warriors two-way days
Oh, what excitement there is by the Bay these days. The Warriors are carefully counting the service days of two-way players Damion Lee and Ky Bowman before they hit the league limit of 45, even canceling a recent practice in part because they didn’t want to lose a day.
Once they hit 45, Golden State would have to either convert them to a regular roster spot, stop playing them or sign somebody else in their spots. The Warriors have a roster spot, but the hard cap limits their ability to convert either immediately.
Both players have used eight of their 45-day allotment. The Warriors can probably milk this until late December or early January with each, depending on how many times they want them to take part in practice days.
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At that point, with the Warriors only 138,000 from the hard cap line, they couldn’t sign either for the rest of the season, let alone both. However, plenty of solutions are on hand. One, obviously, is a trade – if you’re not winning this year anyway, keeping Willie Cauley-Stein or Alec Burks around on a one-year minimum is hardly imperative.
Failing that, however, another clear solution would be to waive the non-guaranteed contract of Marquese Chriss. To the shock of absolutely nobody, he proved to not be a frontcourt savior and has been surpassed by rookie Eric Paschall. (“Surpassed” in this case in much the same way that your ’96 Camry gets “surpassed” by a Porsche on the autobahn).
Cutting Chriss would allow Golden State to sign at least one of Bowman or Lee for the rest of the season – presumably Lee, who has played well — immediately once his 45 days expire. They wouldn’t have enough room immediately to sign Bowman — that likely would wait until after the All-Star break, depending on the timing of Chriss’s departure and Lee’s signing — but they would have the roster spot.
(Top Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
